Seattle Tiger Release

Took some pictures from the Tiger Release Party in University District...



Click here to see more pictures

tiger has landed

Today, Apple Computer released the latest version of the Mac operating system, Mac OSX Tiger.

I, of course, attended the 6pm release party in University District, Seattle.

Unfortunately, I didn't win anything.

But... I have a copy of Tiger in my grubby little hands and I'm about to reboot and install with geekish glee.

Behold my nerdiness.

Regards,
Geek #16 in line at the store.

locked in

Tickets have been bought. Excitement level rising.

tiger review

Interested in reading a 20 page review of Mac OSX Tiger that talks about kernel-level improvements, graphics layer pipelining, and meta-data?

arstechnica review of OSX 10.4 "Tiger"

more pictures

Click here and scroll to the bottom for some new pictures.

Trooper gets all "Dark Side" in today's instalment. :)

false advertising

There's a mob on tv here selling their remote computer control software, and one of their scenarios is:
"You're scaling Mt Fuji. Your boss calls and needs an order changed or you lose the contract. Its on your PC and you're at 15,000ft! You need gotomypc"...

One problem.

Mt Fuji is only 12,388ft tall.

If you can be at 15,000ft on Mt Fuji you don't need any software to control your computer from across the world!

haha

longcorn

Ugh. Windows Longhorn is looking pretty ugly so far:

click for screenshots

I see almost no difference from the space-wasting winXP interface that we're used to. That's a Bad Thing. :(

Maybe MS is luring us into a false sense of fear over Longhorn so they can release something completely different - something good??

late

It's 1.15am and Diana is sleeping. hehe

Tonight was day 2 of the Seattle International Church's evangelism conference. We didn't attend the first night, but tonight was great! The speaker was from Lansing, Michigan, and had a great message about having faith in the good things (both spiritual and physical) that God has promised for our lives. Very inspirational stuff, and of course, it all related back to principles in the Bible. Also, there was a guest musical group called Anointed to Praise... they were _great_! I have a video of one of their songs, and its brilliant, but way to large a file to put online for any period of time. If you see me in person, ask to see it. :)

Anyway, starting to get sleepy. If anyone missed my silly picture from below... scroll down. You can tease me later. hehe

episode 3.5

Just a nice day of church, dropping by an art fair, and stuff.

Oh, and I got a haircut from Brock today. Not bad for a haircut done for free in a church parking lot! :)

Oh yeah, the picture? Bought some cereal that had a free lightsaber spoon! Cool! hahahahahaha

painting

bonsai
Originally uploaded by ntt.

This morning we helped the women's shelter paint the bathroom and toilet areas. That was fun, and productive. A whole bunch of volunteers from Boeing were also there and it was interesting to meet them, too.

We left slightly early to go check out the Japanese Cultural Festival over in Seattle Center. It wasn't as big as we'd hoped, but there was plenty of interesting stuff on display. We may head back tomorrow to hopefully catch a Taiko drum performance and/or sushi making demonstration.

pain!

You remember the scene from Star Trek: the original series, where Spock mind melds with the Horta and senses "PAIN! PAIN!"?? Well, that's my legs right now. All that jogging and cycling has caught up to me and today I'm walking like Forrest Gump with his leg braces on. Except in my case I couldn't run if I tried.

Diana is fine. She must have legs of steel.

Factoid: today is the official start of the Japanese Cultural Festival in Seattle Center. We'll go check it out tomorrow.

burke-gilman

(click for new pics)

Went cycling on the Burke-Gilman trail today. A mere two days after jogging with the Niketown club... my legs are dead! hehe

Brock came with us, and we rode from 11am to 3pm, stopping for lunch along Lake Washington and making a couple other stops to swap bikes and pet cats. Diana and I had borrowed our bikes from Daphne, a really nice lady who Diana met at BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) on Tuesday... and one of the bikes was quite small... probably for a 10 year old girl. So we took turns on that bike... and to be honest besides the fact that our knees hit the handlebars it wasn't any worse than any of the other bikes. Why do I say that? Because bike seats are EVIL. They know just how to hurt a human being. I think someone cruel is fueling the entire bicycle manufacturing industry... I would research it, but I'll say his name is Mr McEvil.

Oh, and on the way back a friendly neighbourhood cat came seeking attention. We got off our bikes, and I was crouched down to pet it when it decided to climb onto my lap and settle down! How cute.

Anyway, it was a fun afternoon/day, and we must thank God for the beautiful weather, awesome scenery, cute animals, and the great way that things worked out (bikes, opportunity etc). Now we're sore and back in the apartment waiting for a good tv show to accidentally find its way onto one of the 90000 TV channels.

Oh. I missed yesterday's blog. There's probably a good reason.

Factoid: Watching seaplanes take off is kinda fun... but not if they go really slow and take-off way off in the distance. :)

spanglish

Quick movie review of Spanglish, starring Adam Sandler and Paz Vega..

It's really very good. :)

I highly recommend it. Certainly holds an honesty and integrity that few movies have.

8.5/10

jogger-ape

Went for a jog with the local Niketown jogging club. Was fun, but man am I not a jogger. hehe. My legs are tired now... and it was only 3 miles. hah!

Earlier, we headed first to Diana's bible study near Northgate, then to University District to pick up her contact lenses. It was such a beautiful day today, too! We could see the mountains in the distance, and the sky was blue!

Oh, and I was struggling with some code all day long. For geek-cred, I will disclose that I was trying to work out Key-Value-Observation issues with a Cocoa-ObjectiveC app I am writing. Basically, you have to keep track of which objects you are observing, and you must stop observing them for changes before they are deallocated. This took me quite a while, as doing it properly requires a pretty good understanding of when events/notifications are sent, and what data is visible at each point. But Oh, the sweet, sweet feeling of victory when the code works and I finally understood everything involved! Yay!

Factoid: If you made it past all the geek-talk, I'm proud of ya. :)

... and the title of this blog? it's an old term I made up when I was 6.

jogger-ape

Went for a jog with the local Niketown jogging club. Was fun, but man am I not a jogger. hehe. My legs are tired now... and it was only 3 miles. hah!

Earlier, we headed first to Diana's bible study near Northgate, then to University District to pick up her contact lenses. It was such a beautiful day today, too! We could see the mountains in the distance, and the sky was blue!

Oh, and I was struggling with some code all day long. For geek-cred, I will disclose that I was trying to work out Key-Value-Observation issues with a Cocoa-ObjectiveC app I am writing. Basically, you have to keep track of which objects you are observing, and you must stop observing them for changes before they are deallocated. This took me quite a while, as doing it properly requires a pretty good understanding of when events/notifications are sent, and what data is visible at each point. But Oh, the sweet, sweet feeling of victory when the code works and I finally understood everything involved! Yay!

Factoid: If you made it past all the geek-talk, I'm proud of ya. :)

... and the title of this blog? it's an old term I made up when I was 6.

queen anne

We got sick of looking at the bottom of Queen Anne, so we checked out her top. The hill, that is. That is one steep hill!

The view is great, and we didn't even check out the most popular vantage point. Instead we walked around the boulevard on the East side where the view of the city is really nice, the houses are pretty, and a tail-less cat decided to be our friend for a block. Nice to make friends in Seattle.

Oh, and I've decided to head to the Apple store on the 29th for the new operating system release. There will be prizes handed out, including laptops, ipods and other cool stuff. How can I resist?

Factoid: I've updated the Favourites gallery with new pics. Just look at the bottom of the gallery page!

swearing

I'm not sure exactly when I changed from being a rebellious youth spouting cuss words to being a cuss-word-hating old person, but at some point I did. There's a whole bunch of reasons why I don't like hearing 's***', 'f***', etc... but essentially it comes down to the fact that what comes out of your mouth is a pretty good indicator of what's brewing in your brain. And I don't want that kinda stuff brewing in my brain.

What triggered this little rant? The guy behind us on the bus today who was on the phone most of the 45 minute ride, swearing his head off the whole way. But what completely blew my mind was when he ended the conversation with "I love you, mom. Take care". Ummmm.... OK.

If my kids speak to me like that I'm gonna revoke their playstation 4 rights for a month. That'll give me some time to play gran turismo 10, anyway.

shopping

Cinnabon
Originally uploaded by ntt.

We caught three buses out to the outlet Supermall today, and that was quite a journey. By bus, its 2 hours each way!

Anyway, I got sneakers for $25, and Diana got some for $32. Not bad! Otherwise we just looked around. There's a Cinnabon store there, one of only two in the Sea-Tac (Seattle Tacoma) area, I think. But I didn't get one. We're saving money and I just had lunch when we saw it. Oh well.

Factoid: bus travel is really reasonable here. Our 2 hour bus ride (2 transfers included) came to $1.25 each. In Perth that would've been $8 or something!

PS. I lost our $3 San Francisco Chinatown umbrella today. We're gonna pick up another cheap umbrella as soon as we can. Hopefully someone who really needs an umbrella will find our last one.

cocoa!

I love learning new programming languages, and Objective-C and Cocoa have been very rewarding.
I gotta say how much fun I have had reading through documentation and really thinking through how best to do things.
For instances, discovering that I could get my application to automatically mark itself as changed (and requiring a save) by adding 7 lines of code... and instantly the app does the things you want it to (ask you to save if you quit after making changes, etc).
Who said programming wasn't fun?

I'm still on the road to implementing Undo, improving my application's behaviours, and adding export and printing functionality... but the small discoveries along the way are so much fun. :)

Footnote: yesterday the deck on top of my apartment building was finished! Yay! Went up and had a look around. Nice view. I'll take pics later... it's raining today.

bewdiful

Wow, the weather was great yesterday! Sunshine and nice temperature.

Was a good day for going and hanging out in Seattle Center while I waited for housekeeping to finish their job.

Factoid: When wireless internet goes on the blink I'm normally cool with it, but I was trying to update code on a remote machine today and it was painful having to reconnect all the time. Oh well, the other side of the apartment gets fine reception (the other side is like 3 feet away).

nicknames

Well, the 'nickname of the week' award goes to the bottom of the hill in Queen Anne. At least, according to the Lonely Planet book, it is called "the bottom of Queen Anne". haha

And on a geek-note: Apple announced the release date for Mac OSX Tiger (finally!)... April 29. I am debating whether to catch a bus out to the U District Apple Store for the 6pm release...

Factoid: With my powerbook I got an S-video to component video cable... which is great... except the component video connector is female and not male, as one requires for connecting into a TV. Cleverly annoying! hehe

Trooper's Binge!

Trooper's Binge!
Originally uploaded by ntt.

We are so fit. No, not really. We used the little gym in our apartment. It was more of a quiz... trying to work out how to use the treadmill (I think Microsoft designed it), and the all-in-one gym thing. I think they both tried to kill us at some point, but they failed.

Watched "Supersize Me". Finally. Gee, I could do with a Big Mac right now. :)

And, on the theme of fitness, I'm sad to say that Trooper has gone on a snack-food binge.

Factoid: The closest place in Seattle that does a Body Pump class isn't technically that far away... but the hill is way too high to walk. Hence, we used the gym here. :)

all's quiet...

Not much to report today, except that church was good, as usual, and we watched Butterfly Effect on DVD. It's passable, but not great... a bit too much violence and swearing and stuff for my liking.

Factoid: The closed captions for deaf people on TV are quite entertaining in their own right. I just imagine some person trying to type madly away as the show is being aired... and the typos are brilliant. "Fisiks"... is "physics", apparently. Haha!

entertainment

Well, we signed up with blockbuster. $9.95 for a month for unlimited rentals (1 at a time). Good value. Someone tell Hollywood to keep pumping out new DVDs though.

Also, gave in to the snack food. Twizzlers. ReeseSticks. TootsieRolls... Yum.

U Dub

Diana and I decided to check out University District today, where we did the Lonely Planet walking tour of the campus and main street, then headed to look at University Village shopping mall, as well. UWA (funny, same as Uni of W. Australia) is a pretty campus, and the library in particular is quite a fine building. It is the beginning of a new semester, so there were hundreds of stunned college students wandering around.

Anyway, because UWA was so pretty, I ended up adding 3 new photos to my favourites gallery. Click here to see the new pictures (oldest pictures are at the top).

Factoid: Apple's 30" displays make normal web pages look puny. To compensate you must open 8 web browsers and put them side by side so it looks like you're using the screen properly. In fact, if you convinced your work to fork out the money for one, you'd feel compelled to work on 10 things simultaneously to justify the cost and screen real estate (other than to display life-size pictures of your pets).

Space Needle

Space Needle
Originally uploaded by ntt.

Fun fact: my broadband connection here is 5 times faster than my broadband in Perth. Crazy!

Diana did some free work today for a financial planning group, while I studied Obj-C and sent my resume out. Then we met up for lunch because it is our 9 year 9 month relationship anniversary! Yay! :)

Factoid: When heading out of downtown on a bus you pay as you exit... when heading into downtown by bus you pay as you enter. Interesting...

Misto?

Had lunch with Holly from SIC today. Was really great to get to know her better and hear her story.

Tried ordering something slightly different at Starbucks and ended up with a 'caffe misto'. It wasn't on the menu, but it ended up being better than a latte. It turns out you need a guide to starbucks terminology. I'll learn.

Am currently 80% of my way through a 142 pages guide on Objective C programming. Interesting stuff.

Factoid: They repeat TV shows here alot. I think its the fact that there's about 50 more channels than they need. I think digital on-demand shows on maybe 10 different providers would be the way to go in the future.

Trooper at Pike Place Fish Market

Well, someone asked me for a pic of Trooper at Pike Place Fish Markets... and I was in the area today so I took two blurry pics. Hope I've made someone happy. :)

Click to view the trooper gallery

Productivity resumed!

Bus adventure: we caught some local buses out north across Lake Union to get Diana to BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) at 9.10am. Diana attends BSF in Perth, and after today's intro she'll be attending once a week in Seattle too!

While Diana was in BSF I sat in the foyer (its a women's only study) and got my coding environment setup properly to resume my Java/Cocoa programming. The frustrating part was that while my code was fine, the development tool (XCode) had gotten corrupt somehow and was trying to reference files in the wrong directory. Argh. I eventually created a new project and copied my code across. Victory!

Went to prayer at Seattle International Church tonight, too. That was cool... a very spiritual church.

Factoid: 94% fat free popcorn is still 6% fat.

Factoid 2: Seattle is the most un-churched city in the USA.

Fish!

(this is one day late cause blogger.com was faulty yesterday)

Happened to be in Pike Place Markets today while a documentary crew were filming the Pike Place fish market guys. So they were playing up a lot more than last time we were there - throwing fish, freaking out little kids with ugly monk fish and making a crazy hat out of a squid. Funny stuff.

Also got me a "Seattle" shirt. I'm one of the locals now. haha

Factoid: The Space Needle is twice as heavy underground as it is above ground to keep it balanced. The concrete pouring effort made the Guinness Book of World Records.

A Day With God

Made it to two church services today: Seattle International Church in the morning for some great gospel music and a good word, and Mars Hill Church in the evening for rock style music and in-depth biblical teaching. Was really amazing to see what God is doing in these two very different, but both rapidly growing churches!

Today's factoid: Though it technically rained today, we didn't need an umbrella... which seems to be quite common.

Lost in seattle

Lost in Seattle is a cool website that maps out any business with a shop-front in the Seattle area. It isn't 100% complete, but it is cool for looking around for shops in a certain area.

Recovery

Step 1. Wake up late and feel the pain
Step 2. Stay inside until afternoon
Step 3. Go for a walk and bit of shopping
Step 4. Return for hot bath and wait for sore muscles to unsore-ify

Factoid: Every Seattle tourist spot sells some kind of coffee mug or thermos.

Volunskiing

Yesterday, Diana did some volunteer work in the morning for a local women's shelter. She was basically stuffing envelopes but met with the people and has some information on other things they need volunteers for, which is great. Also, God may have dropped an opportunity into our laps with one of the ladies that she met saying that her husband is the manager of a web development department near our apartment! We'll be praying that something comes of that.

In the afternoon we started researching skiing. After making lots of plans, we called up Brock to see if he was interested in going. Yes! So we made new plans and ended up being picked up, and went shopping for cheap second-hand ski clothes... more money spent... but well worth it.

Today... we went skiing! Wow, the slopes were only an hour out of Seattle and the mountains were beautiful. During the course of the day it was sunny, rainy and snowing. Diana and I got lessons in the morning, and then we had lunch. Then we hit the slopes again, and started to enjoy things more - less thinking and more skiing. Later, Brock took us up the wrong ski lift and we ended up on an expert slope. OUCH. Man, it was scary and steep, and we fell over a million times and slid most of the way down on our bottoms. haha. After that we just had time and energy to survive one more run of the beginner's slope. Overall, we had an awesome time and saw some beautiful scenery and weather.

Now, after a hot shower and a nice dinner... we're exhausted and bruised... and will go to sleep early in all likelihood. Take care!


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